Boston resurrects nightmare that sport is sadly an easy target

Police clear the area at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon (AP)

Medical workers aid injured people at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon (AP)

One of the blast sites is examined on Boylston Street near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. (AP)

The explosions killed three people and injured more than 140 (AP/The Boston Globe, David L Ryan)

The second victim of Boston Marathon bombings named as 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell

Flowers sit at a police barrier near the finish line of the Boston Marathon (AP)

President Barack Obama speaks in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Neighbours lay flowers at the house of the 8-year-old victim (AP)

Three people were killed and more than 100 injured in two bomb attacks at the Boston Marathon

Medical workers aid an injured man at the 2013 Boston Marathon following an explosion in Boston, Monday, April 15, 2013.

BOSTON, MA - APRIL 15: Runners react near Kenmore Square after two bombs exploded during the 117th Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 injured after two explosions went off near the finish line to the marathon. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

BOSTON, MA - APRIL 15: Runners react near Kenmore Square after two bombs exploded during the 117th Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 injured after two explosions went off near the finish line to the marathon. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

BOSTON, MA - APRIL 15: Two blood stained feet of a man hangs outside an ambulance outside a medical tent located near the finish of the 117th Boston Marathon after two bombs exploded on the marathon route on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 injured after two explosions went off near the finish line to the marathon. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

BOSTON, MA - APRIL 15: Members of the bomb squad investigate a suspicious item on the road as runners pass near Kenmore Square after two bombs exploded during the 117th Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 injured after two explosions went off near the finish line to the marathon. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

As America is once again traumatised by the random horrors of terrorism, as tragic and gruesome details are piled one on top of the other, sport does not need telling its own fate.

It is returned to its perilous status as maybe the softest – and most rewarding – of targets.

Sport is supposed to be charmed, insulated from the worst possibilities of real life but it is for this very reason that it is so vulnerable – and will always be so.

If you hit sport, you strike at one of the most comfortable places the world likes to think it inhabits.

Amid all of the anguished reactions along the finishing straight of the Boston Marathon on Monday, maybe the most pervasive was the one on all those faces which said, "Not here, not now, it just cannot be".

But, of course, it could and the images of the Boston outrage now have to be added to those of the Munich Olympics in 1972, when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were slaughtered by the Palestinian Black September group, and those in the city of Atlanta in 1996 when a lone fanatic set off a bomb that killed two and injured more than a 100 and brought the Games to the brink of abandonment.

Boston's disbelief and fear was Atlanta's 17 years ago when the bomb went off in the Olympic Park and a whole city feared what might happen next.

Kimberly Krautter, who was part of the Atlanta crisis management team and is now a leading security consultant, says, "Whatever you do, and however much you understand the need for security, there is always the feeling that it just cannot happen to you. It seems so unnatural to attack a great sports event. In Atlanta we took every measure we could, but it is just something you cannot really expect or, in the end, be prepared for."

Boston has resurrected the nightmare which lurked just below the surface throughout the joyous Olympics of London last summer. It has provided a sickeningly re-focused picture of the impact of such an unnatural intrusion into something designed to cross all borders and political divisions peaceably.

More than 100 nations were represented in Boston – the most famous of the marathons staged by great cities, including London and New York – and this, of course, guaranteed more worldwide oxygen for the force of terror.

In 1997 a few code words of the IRA were sufficient to bring chaos and panic to the Grand National. The race was postponed for two days. The Aintree course was abandoned to all but police and security men. When you returned you found half-eaten meals and so many other signs of sudden flight. Compared to Munich and Atlanta and Boston, Aintree was blessedly unscathed. But it felt a terrible power for disruption.

In Munich the official reaction was extraordinary in that it was part bemusement, part denial.

For the International Olympic committee it was almost as though the massacre had not happened. Nothing, said the American plutocrat president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, could stop the march of the Games.

Many leading athletes, it has to be said, took a similar line, but one who did not, the Canadian world record-holding high jumper Debbie Brill, recalls, "So many people were saying, 'Look, we have trained all our lives for this – what good will it do if the Games are stopped?' On the last day of the Games I went with some friends and fellow athletes up to a roof in the Olympic Village and then we saw balloons filling the sky over the Olympic Stadium. I thought, 'Oh God, this is unbelievable.'"

Now there is no such suspension of reality here in America – or any corner of sport.

The most competitive of the runners had long passed the finish line when the two bombs exploded but no one questioned the fact that the meaning of one of the big days of the sporting calendar had been obliterated.

It could not be otherwise when you considered the fate of the eight-year-old boy who was killed moments after hugging his father at the finish line and whose sister lost a leg and whose mother was rushed to the operating room for brain surgery.

Sport has lost its innocence for many reasons, but this was another – and one over which it simply has no control.

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